Submarine! (33 page)

We had dived at a little after midnight. Seventeen hours
later we are still creeping along under continual harassment by our pursuers. All bilges are full of water to the danger limits. We have been bailing from the motor room to the after torpedo room for twelve hours, keeping the water out of the motors and reduction gears. The temperature has risen to a fantastic 135 degrees throughout the ship. Two or three men are near collapse from combination of nervous strain, lack of sufficient oxygen, and loss of salt from the system—though we all eat handfuls of salt tablets. We sweat profusely, and our clothes are drenched, our socks soggy, and our shoes soaked. In an attempt to lessen the nuisance of constantly wiping the sweat out of their eyes or off their bodies, many men knot rags around their foreheads or drape them over their shoulders and around their necks. The atmosphere is laden with moisture, which condenses everywhere. Bulkheads and vertical surfaces are simply beaded with water, perpetually running in sudden little rivulets to the deck. Our green linoleum decks are themselves a quarter of an inch deep in water already, and the constant moving about by men in greasy, soggy shoes has churned it up into a disgusting, slimy, muddy ooze through which we shuffle, oblivious to anything but the awful nearness of those menacing propellers overhead, the labor of breathing the foul air, and the terrific concussions of the unrelenting depth charges.

Three hundred feet below the surface, where the water is black and always cold, and the sea pressure compresses the hull with a force of 150 pounds per square inch, sustaining a total “squeeze” of about three hundred million pounds,
Trigger
fights for her life. Her sleek black hull, now tortured and strained, is heavier than the water it displaces by many thousands of pounds. This condition is due to loss of buoyancy caused by the compression of her hull and to the fact that her seams have been leaking steadily under the pounding she's been taking-and the pumps cannot be run, for the noise would immediately betray her exact position. With bow and stern planes at full rise and herself at a ten-degree up angle,
Trigger
struggles to keep from sinking any deeper. Gradually, as the water inside increases and she becomes
heavier, she is forced to assume more and more of an up angle, like a heavily laden airplane climbing under full throttle—only her problem is to maintain the same depth with minimum power.

That the water at 300 feet is colder than at the surface is a help, because it is denser, giving
Trigger
more buoyancy—but we've used up this “velvet” long ago. This difference in surface and deep-water temperatures should also hinder the Japs' sound-detection apparatus, but so far as we can discern, it hasn't bothered them much.

No matter which way we go, the deadly circle moves with us. We try several times to go through the gap in the circle left by the destroyer making the current attack, but that move apparently has been foreseen, for we are invariably blocked by not one but two sets of screws—those of the two vessels adjacent to the one making the run.

We wonder why the six escorts do not make a single coordinated attack on us. They have us so well boxed in that such an attack really would be a lulu! The thought grows that possibly they expect us to surface and surrender. If they keep up these tactics, and don't sink us with a lucky depth charge, eventually we will run out of oxygen or battery power and be forced to surface.

But we lay our plans for that contingency.
Trigger
will never surrender. We'll come up in the darkest hour of the night, at full speed, all hands at gun stations, and twenty torpedoes ready. It will be mighty dangerous for anything short of a full-fledged destroyer to get in our way.

The decision is made to surface at about twenty-one hundred, after sunset and evening twilight are over, and before moonrise. Our battery and oxygen would probably last us another twenty-four hours, but then we'd
have
to come up. This way, at least, we still can dive and hide, and if we can only get up for two hours or so we'll be almost completely recovered, battery more than two thirds recharged, and ready for anything.

Such are the plans and arguments that pass through our minds that long and horrible day. Late that afternoon, however,
fortune once more smiles our way. We realize that we have approached the southern edge of the circle, that the Japs have apparently temporarily lost contact, perhaps grown a bit careless, and that no depth charge runs have been made for quite some time.

We've tried it before, but here goes again. We head for the biggest gap in the circle, and slowly increase speed as much as we dare—which isn't much. We listen with bated breath, hardly daring to breathe, plotting in those malevolent screws, trying to identify the bird who is supposed to cover the sector we've chosen for our escape route.

Here he comes! One set of screw noises slowly gets louder and begins to draw ahead. We shudder as he gains bearing on us. Surely he'll pick us up, because he'll be practically right on top of us! But—another smile from the blindfolded gal—all at once he stops drawing ahead. Now, as we cluster around the sound gear, we watch the telltale bearing pointer move aft, ever aft, till finally he passes across our stern! A guarded cheer breaks from the desperate men in the conning tower. We've broken through!

There is nothing to compare with the fresh, cool sweetness of the pure night air. It overpowers you with its vitality, reaches deep down inside you and sweeps away every remaining vestige of tiredness, fear, or unhappiness. It is frank, pure, undiluted Joy.

Three weeks later, after bumming some urgently needed repair parts from
Tang
at a midnight rendezvous,
Trigger
sank four freighters and one escort out of a convoy of five freighters and five escorts. With one torpedo left, she chased the remaining freighter and four escorts, snapping at their heels, till finally, for fear of grounding herself, she desisted. But she had the pleasure of knowing that all five ships had run hard aground, as verified by another submarine.

Harlfinger's first patrol was my last in
Trigger
, for when we returned to port my orders were waiting for me, and I was relieved by my Naval Academy classmate, Johnnie Shepherd.
Trigger
was adjudged so badly damaged that she
required a six-week repair period in a navy yard in the States, instead of the customary two-week refit.

When she headed west again, after a thorough overhaul, the old girl waved a cockscomb of thirty-six miniature Jap flags, a Presidential Unit Citation pennant, and a homemade blue flag with a large white numeral on it, emblazoning her claim to be number one submarine of the fleet, while at the top of her fully-extended periscope fluttered a rather weather-beaten brassière.

USS
Batfish
got under way from Pearl Harbor on December 30, 1944, on what was to be her sixth war patrol. It was also to be one of the epoch-making patrols of the war, one whose influence may be discerned even at this late date. Her skipper was Commander J. K. Fyfe, a Naval Academy graduate of the class of 1936, who had already built up an outstanding record of successful submarine action. From the time when the PC boat escorting her out of Pearl Harbor was dismissed until she arrived at Guam, Jake Fyfe kept his ship at flank speed. He, in common with most submariners, saw no reason for delay in getting into the war zone, except the necessity of conserving fuel. The capture of Guam removed that necessity, insofar as the first leg of the trip was
concerned. After leaving Guam or Saipan it usually paid to be a bit conservative, in case you ran into a long chase, or were given a prolonged special mission.

On January 9, 1945,
Batfish
arrived at Guam, and on the next day she departed en route to an area north of the Philippines. On January 12 she sighted what was probably her first enemy contact on this particular patrol, presaging the turn which the whole patrol would subsequently take. A periscope suddenly popped out of the water some distance ahead. Since you don't stick around to argue with an enemy submarine which has the drop on you, and since, besides, Jake was in a hurry to get to his area where he was scheduled for immediate lifeguard services, he simply bent on everything she would take and got out of there. Sightings of Japanese periscopes by our boats were fairly numerous during the war. The Japs never learned how
doubly
cautious you must be when stalking one of your own kind; we never learned a lesson better.

Between January 13 and February 9
Batfish
had rather a dull time. She wasted two days looking for several aviators who were reported ditched near her track; investigated twenty-eight junks to see what kind of cargo they were carrying; dived at occasional aircraft alarms. Then, on February 9, while she was patroling in Babuyan Channel, south of Gamiguin Island, the radar operator sounds a warning.

Something in his radar arouses his attention—he looks closely—there it is again—and again. It is not a pip which he sees; if it were, he would not wait to sing out “Radar contact” and thereby immediately mobilize the ship for action. This is something more difficult to evaluate. A faint shimmering of the scopes—a momentary unsteadiness in the green and amber cathode ray tubes—which comes and goes. Almost unconsciously he times them, and notices the bearing upon which the radar head is trained each time the faint wobble in the normal “grass” presentation is noticed. A few moments of this, and—
“Captain to the conn!”
No time to wait on ceremony. This particular lad wants his skipper, and he wants him badly.

A split second later the word reaches Jake Fyfe in his cabin, where he had lain down fully clothed for a few minutes of shut-eye. In a moment the skipper is in the conning tower.

The radar operator points to his scope. “There it is, sir! There it is again! I just noticed it a minute ago!” The operator is doing himself an injustice; from the time he first noticed there was something out of the ordinary to the moment Fyfe himself was beside him could not have been more than thirty seconds.

The Captain stares at the instrument, weighing the significance of what he sees. This is something new, something portentous—there is a small stirring in the back of his mind—there seems to be a half-remembered idea there, if he can only dig it up—then, like a flash, he has it! If he is right, it means they are in grave danger, with a chance to come out of it and maybe add another scalp to their belts; if he is wrong, what he is about to do may make a bad situation infinitely worse. But Jake knows what he is doing. He is not playing some farfetched hunch.

“Secure the radar!” he orders. The operator reaches to the cutoff switch and flips it, looking questioningly at his skipper.

“What do you think it is?” Fyfe asks the lad.

“It looked like another radar to me, Captain.” The reply
is
given without hesitation.

“What else?”

The boy is at a loss for an answer, and Jake Fyfe answers his own question:

“Japanese submarine!”

Submarine
vs
. submarine! The hunter hunted! The biggest fear of our submarine sailors during World War II was that an enemy submarine might get the drop on them while they were making a passage on the surface. It would be quite simple, really. All you have to do is to detect the other fellow first, either by sight or by radar, submerge on his track,
and let go the fish as he passes.
All you have to do is to detect him first!

Our submarines ran around the coast of Japan as though they were in their own back yards. They usually condescended to patrol submerged only when within sight of the enemy shore line in order not to be spotted by shore watchers or aircraft patrols, for you can't sink ships which stay in port because they know you are waiting outside. But when out of sight of land, and with no planes about, United States submarines usually remained on the surface. Thus they increased their search radius and the speed with which they could move to new positions. And it should not be forgotten that the fifty-odd boats doing lifeguard duty at the end of the war were required to stay on the surface whether in sight of land or not! Small wonder that our submarine lookouts were the best in the Navy.

United States submariners were, as a class, far too well acquainted with the devastating surprise which can be dealt with a pair of well-aimed torpedoes to take any preventable risk of being on the receiving end themselves. Submarines are rugged ships, but they have so little reserve buoyancy that a torpedo hit is certain to permit enough water to flood in to overbalance what remaining buoyancy there is. Even though the submarine might be otherwise intact, she would instantly sink to the bottom of the sea with most of her crew trapped inside.
Tang
was a prime example. Ordinarily there are no survivors from sunken submarines, with the exception of the Germans, who had a habit of surfacing and abandoning ship when under attack.